Once again a high profile celebrity has been granted a court injunction to stop the reporting in the uk of details of a threesome his partner was supposedly involved in. the injunction only applies to the UK. A US news publication has named the celebrity and his partner and given details of the infidelity.
Almost immediately and namely the social media networks were awash with the names; google and bing searches were just as fruitful. As with other high profile celebrity injunctions and more serious criminal cases such as the recent adam johnson case anomonimity if granted cannot be guarenteed. Naming such prople in the UK granted anonomous status in the UK can result in prosecution of the person that releases the details though how many people have been prosecuted I am unsure.
Obviously one could argue that injunctions surrounding celebrity relationship scandals just show that some people have too much money; quite often the same celebrity is quite happy to sell stories of their life to magazines for vast sums of money but are not so keen on scandal appearing in the pubic domain even if their partner knows the details.
Where as victims of crimes committed against them who have been granted anonimity should be allowed to remain anonomous,
So how do Social Media and Search Engines fail to protect the victims.
If you take google and bing as search engines the search pages as part of the search result have content sections that show related searches that have been carried out by other users. The search boxes themselves show drop downs of related searches. Quite rapidly the names of people granted anomonimity appear in these sections. From these names it can be quite easy to find more personal information of these people.
Even twitter and facebook have similar search functionality where related results and searches are shown. Quite quickly innocent names can on twitter appear in the trending section.
Obviously quite quickly the results are adjusted and names are removed by moderators but one would presume this would only occur after a complaint has been made. The alogorithms dont seem to stop everything and perhaps only the link to the content that has been complained about. It is quite easily to spoof your location and search in countries where the data has not been removed to find the details that have been surpressed in say the UK.
More should be done to stop victims names from becoming known in the public domain; the internet has no borders and court orders in one country do not apply in other countries.
